Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (1961) by Remedios Varo
“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” - from “Manual of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
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Even the most delicate care must be open to the revelation that a correct balance need not be a balance of equilibrium. For all that may be sought of balance, even the exegesis that turns inward may yet encounter a gulf. Equivocation then becomes the practice of the good theorist, at home in their concepts and their distance. Perhaps the only evasion of this trap posed by contemplation is its commitment to a practice at the outset, a position from which it claims itself and from which its maneuvers may be evaluated; to declare a starting-point of engagement, an axis for transformation to depart from and in turn recur as a moment in the realization of a perpetual (r)evolution.
From the beginning then let us state that the investigation begins with an articulation of the dimension of historical time in Marx’s conceptual determinations of capital’s movement. This is a continuation of and proper beginning to a desired research program first declared in an earlier post. The aim at present is to develop an investigation into Marx’s concept of the organic composition of capital, its relation to the general law and dynamics of capitalist accumulation, in order to develop a method of historical interpretation that can generate a means to evaluate historical and historiographic texts on the emergence and reproduction of the capitalist mode of production, with an eye towards the socio-historical determinants in the constitution of the state form as a moment in the movement of class struggle. Our hope at present is that such a program can be generative in a non-exhaustive manner, and contribute to an opening of history as a becoming of the present, mediating past and future as a struggle for the conquest of time.
History mediates a methodological consideration throughout Capital, of which the specificity of capitalist social relations, the forms through and by which the practices of the social reproduction of material life are themselves mediated, are developed from the movement of economic forms and their relations to reveal their social constitution. This starts from the mystifying manner of which these economic forms appear as self-positing presuppositions, moments that serve as preconditions for a process in which they in turn are the results. There is a reflexivity in the manner with which Marx moves in and through moments of the abstract and concrete. These interpenetrating dimensions of form and time, their levels of analysis, can cloud the degree to which an apparent example is not a separate regression into positivism, but a swallowing up of the empirical within itself as a moment in and of a movement that absorbs facticity into a process of its own de-fetishization. It is not the mere deployment of a terminological consistency which establishes a basis for immanent critique, but the exposition of categories and their relation to each other as a movement that makes implicit a confusion of temporal determination. This confusion is one resulting from a resistance to historical time’s ultimate capitulation to transience, from which all that is new must spring. Where political economy uncritically renders its conditions of existence eternal, the critique of political economy must assert true life as that which reveres its dead, for reverence is the foundation of true culture.
The question becomes “how indispensable are the reams of empirical examples to which Marx constantly refers throughout the text to the validity of the logical movements between categories?” Or, put another way, “how necessary is the logical architecture for situating the empirical material in an intelligible way?” Can one extract a “model” of the capitalist “system” from Capital that successfully transcends its historical temporality?1 We may begin by addressing these elements of the text as essential to the argument, moments that are not merely exemplary, but reconstruct the immediacy of practical concerns into a mediation of present and past which opens history to practice as the construction of the future. Movements of the logical and the empirical, from and between, form a subsumption of bourgeois thought into a movement it denies, yet cannot help but continually develop itself within and against. Thus, immanent to political economy’s alienation of history, an adherence to a de-fetishization of historical time produces a continual mediation between past and future of a present that is historical and concrete offers a transcendence in the opening of time to the possibility of its seizure. That is, in order to make this leap, the interpreter first requires a commitment to the possibility of practice and its situation, lest they remain enclosed within the circularity of historical specificity as it appears in Capital, thus closing oneself off to the method of history’s expropriation.
Thus it is the case that we develop our starting-point as one in which our concern is not solely historical time as it appears in Marx, but the development of a method of practical thought in which the possibility or practice opens to the becoming of praxis, and in turn opens history to the potentiality of social transformation. The perpetual problem beyond Marx has been the conditions of the transition of such to actuality. Yet it is our contention here that in order to do so, many contributions sharing this fidelity may be made, and this inquiry seeks to fortify the project from the position of historiographic practice. If one could articulate the aim of such an apparently esoteric commitment and the direct relationship it bears to such questions of immediate practical bearing, we may say that such commitment to applied interrogation of history’s textual inter-mediation is itself the production of a genesis which seeks to transform the relationship to the present through a unification of theory and practice in time.
We find this appeal quite explicitly in Marx, at the outset of Capital in the development of the theory of commodity fetishism, through which we come to understand the peculiar state of a society in which the capitalist mode of production predominates as one in which social relations between people are mediated by things, and thus also appears to the subjective agents of this society to be an objective agency alien of their own will. “Their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them.”2 The labor of social production appears to the producers and their administrators as simply so many private labors, acting on behalf of a will independent of and beyond them. The agency of the capitalist social formation’s movement is attributed to so many forms, commodity, money, value, etc., that are indifferent to the material character that they must assume in order to carry on a transformation into each other. Marx ascribes a religious character to the autonomous movement of these categories, “endowed with a life of their own”, with the designation of this dialectical inversion of the agency of social production as a fetishism that “attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.”3 For Marx, however, the mysterious quality of this “phantom-like objectivity” dissipates with a certain temporal position:
“The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i.e. commodity production. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production.”4
The objectivity of the forms of value in which capital is expressed, and through which labor is represented as abstracted from any of its concrete activities into a purely quantitative expression of monetary wealth, retains its validity only through the historically-determined social form of commodity production. The notion of the commodity as a social form implies an aspiration towards totality that it requires for intelligibility, that it itself composes and is composed of, an articulation of activity that its social nature expresses and reflects back upon. This totality that makes social form intelligible requires the position of historical thought. For Marx, this illusory appearance of the objective existence of the form of the product as a commodity, of an immediate unity of the contradictory expressions of use and exchange value, disappears when it encounters other historical forms of production. That is, the predominance of the commodity form is itself a historical product, a result of the transience of preceding epochs of social relations of production preceding those of commodity production and thus indicating the transience of the commodity. Already an opening presents itself.
Where political economy presents itself as the science of material production, it is rather the science proper to bourgeois society’s dominance, the science of the reproduction of this particular social form of production. Political economy navigates its own terms with a characteristic rigor, yet it fails to properly identify the conditions of its own existence, there is a confusion of causality: “Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product.”5 The question is then one of the particular origins of an economy managed by the productivity of labor-time, and further why it is that labor-time can form the particular dynamics of expansion of the form of surplus-value? This question finds its answer in the situating of commodity production as the form adequate to the capitalist mode of production in an investigation of historical determination, through which a movement beyond reveals itself:
“The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc.”6
Our mission then presents itself as one in which the specificity of the form of value derives its validity as an objective condition of existence through the historical development of the form of social relations in the production and reproduction of material life. Marx’s identification of the logical implication in the specificity of the capitalist or bourgeois mode of production as its bearing a historical and thus transient character is the commitment at the outset of a project which aims to thus locate these conditions by which this mode of production presents its own supersession as immanent to its laws of development. Even thus, throughout the course of Capital we encounter the unmasking of these laws of motion or development, a successive explication of their movements and an exhaustion of their relative indetermination into the final, ultimate de-fetishization of the text’s later chapters, where the existence of a proletarian class that sells its capacity to work as the commodity labor-power is revealed to be the historical product of dispossession, expropriation, and struggle.
If this summary is brusque, it is merely for the fact that these are preliminary identifications of the mode of historical thought and its corresponding time that can be understood as a declared influence in Marx’s Capital. We will be returning to much of this in greater depth as this program continues. For now, we may say that a particular position is staked out by Marx here, one in which the elaboration of the form of value and the dynamics of constitution by which the categories that articulate and condition the movement of capitalist society are developed reveals an ultimate relationship to history, and through this development of a critique of history seeks to illuminate the conditions of the reciprocal expropriation that opens it in determinate negation. These perceptions of the role of history and its relation to social practice in Marx have led to generative experiments in the creation and development of many Marxisms before, as we turn now to these to also orient ourselves in the continuation of this study.
György Lukács, in his early attempt at the construction of a philosophy of praxis in the dimming light of October 1917, would too perceive this role of historical time and thought, yet his own problematization of it revealed a deeper level to the experience of history. At the outset,
“Historical thought perceives the correspondence of thought and existence in their - immediate, but no more than immediate - rigid, reified structure. This is precisely the point at which non-dialectical thought is confronted by this insoluble problem. From the fact of this rigid confrontation it follows (1) that thought and (empirical) existence cannot reflect each other, but also (2) that the criterion of correct thought can only be found in the realm of reflection. As long as man adopts a stance of intuition and contemplation he can only relate to his own thought and to the objects of the empirical world in an immediate way. He accepts both as ready-made - produced by historical reality. As he wishes only to know the world and not to change it he is forced to accept both the empirical, material rigidity of existence and the logical rigidity of concepts as unchangeable. His mythological analyses are not concerned with the concrete origins of this rigidity nor with the real factors inherent in them that could lead to its elimination. They are concerned solely to discover how the unchanged nature of these data could be conjoined whilst leaving them unchanged and how to explain them as such.”7
In its immediacy, history only becomes accessed as the reified reflection of the social objectivity by which we also encounter existence within commodity production. Reflection and contemplation as pure thought cannot bear upon the world except as a repetition of its rigidity in its uninvestigated conceptual determinations. For history itself to become more than this, Lukács turns to Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach and its instruction to transform philosophy into praxis. Yet, as Lukács tells us, “this praxis has its objective and structural preconditions and complement in the view that reality is a ‘complex of processes’. That is to say, in the view that the movements of history represent the true reality; not indeed a transcendental one, but at all events a higher one than that of the rigid, reified facts of the empirical world, from which they arise.”8 Thus it is the case that the complex of processes given by Marx’s ensemble of social relations attributes to the critical, and thus practical, engagement with history a movement that subverts and undoes its reflection as a rigid and reified objectivity. No longer identical with the conditions of its empirical existence within the confines of the specific moment of its apprehension in an eternalized presence, historical consciousness reveals to us that “[t]his reality is not, it becomes.”9
For Lukács, this process of Becoming has a dual character. The first aspect is that “the transformation of things into a process provides a concrete solution to all the concrete problems created by the paradoxes of existent objects”, thus revealing the true nature of the object (capitalist class society, commodity production, history).10 History and the consciousness of the specificity of capitalism’s emergence and the continual development in its reproduction is an entrance into the apprehension of the concrete which produces as an interpenetrating moment the abstractions from which we also understand and analyze the specificity of capitalism’s movement. Thus it is that “the recognition that capital as a process can only be accumulated, or rather accumulating, capital, provides the positive, concrete solution to a whole host of positive, concrete problems of method and of substance connected with capital.”11 The second aspect extends and intercedes with this de-alienation of the object of inquiry. Where this Becoming takes on thought as a form of reality that is itself in and of praxis,
“Becoming is also the mediation between past and future. But it is mediation between the concrete, i.e. historical past, and the equally concrete, i.e. historical future. When the concrete here and now dissolves into a process it is no longer a continuous, intangible moment, immediacy slipping away; it is the focus of the deepest and most widely ramified mediation, the focus of decision and of the birth of the new. As long as man concentrates his interest contemplatively upon the past or future, both ossify into an alien existence. And between the subject and the object lies the unbridgeable ‘pernicious chasm’ of the present. Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does this will the present be a process of becoming, that belongs to him. Only he who is willing and whose mission it is to create the future can see the present in its concrete truth. As Hegel says: ‘Truth is not to treat objects as alien.’”12
While there appears to be a voluntarist tension in Lukács’ position, yet it is rather that it is such an active relation that is the only means by which process and Becoming can be a moment of agentic constitution in class struggle. As such, the intercession of Becoming into historical time as a moment in the procedure of the practical thought of class struggle is a partisan science, within which the commitment is itself the entrance to history; whether it be an adoption or an abdication of such when the theorist enters into history.
Thus we can also understand Marx’s forays into the concrete throughout Capital as moments in which this history-as-Becoming is instantiated, not as mere illustrations of consequences of an abstract and logically-derived process of the production of capital, but the very internal elements through which this process is constituted and reproduced. The famous chapter on the working day, in which absolute surplus-value, the production of surplus value through an absolute quantitative increase in labor-time beyond the needs required to reproduce subsistence in the monetary form of wages, illustrates a limit on surplus value in an extensive direction. The very struggle of the workers succeeds in producing the legislative limit on the working day, which in turn promotes the intensive exploitation of experiments in the combination of labor, manufacturing, and machinery in large-scale industry, from which the concept of relative surplus-value forms, as labor-time becomes more flexible within determinate constraints, and thus marks another register of development in the conditions of the historical practice of class struggle. Historical time is in and of this movement of exposition, continually adjusting scale and focus to the conditions of conceptual development. Such discernments can themselves only be the product of a practical commitment at the outset, of a socially-determined subjectivity that undermines as much as it is itself of scientific objectivity.
However, these registers of historical time in Marx can themselves be brought under greater scrutiny, and thus yield a greater methodological contribution than the mere recognition of such offers. Characteristic of Marx and his dual forms, dialectical thought continually generates a reflexive movement in time that is also not reducible to identifications of specificity in a vacuum, for specificity itself implies the requirement of historical comparison, of a continuity which bridges and articulates the discontinuities that emerge from such qualitative transformations, breaking the serene objectivity of the quantitative flattening of relations. The Marxist pedagogue and philosopher István Mészáros identifies such a dialectic in Marx:
“The way in which some categories cross the frontiers of different social formations, shows the objective dialectic of the historical and the transhistorical at work. This must be grasped in theory both in terms of the objectively different levels and scales of temporality and as a vital characteristic of the given social structures. (The latter exhibit the correlation between the historical and the transhistorical in the form of continuity in discontinuity, and discontinuity in even the apparently most stable continuity). In Marx’s view, stressing these links and determinations serves to articulate in theory the historical dynamism of the social processes and the objective structural characteristics of all the relevant factors which together constitute the real ground of all categorial condensations and reflections. Thus, the contrast with deductivism and with all past conceptions of the nature and importance of categories could not be greater.”13
Such a maneuver then requires us to interpret Marx with a sense of what historical movements preceding the capitalist mode of production in turn condition the possibility of its emergence and from which also make history intelligible to us from the position of the present, opening historical time to the identification of process and Becoming. For Mészáros, the discovery of this objective dialectic of the historical and transhistorical results from the understanding by which the unique combination of such categories as capital, wage labor, world market, and state combine to identify the historical specificity of the capitalist social formation. Historical investigations conducted in the interests of historiographic analysis, however, reveal that the specificity of the capitalist social formation and the formal coherence of its adequate mode of production is not reducible to the historical presence of any one of these categories. Thus, an attention to the dynamic constitution of these categories in history as they in turn relate to that constitution from which we understand them in the present is necessary in order to conduct the procedure of de-fetishization. For it is the case that the practical commitment to history as a partisan science is necessarily to understand the means by which history has been made by determinate actors, and thus in turn understand the potentiality of determinate agents within our own time.
With this, let us then state that of which the operation at present will consist. The interest in the organic composition of capital is in the concept’s illustration of a particular dynamic in the relation between the material-physical components of the production process and the social forms in and through which they are expressed and function as sums of capital. This interpenetrating and coterminous fate of the social and the material interests us, as Marx makes clear that a particular relation between these two dimensions is the composition organic to capital, an expression of its internally-constitutive being as a social relation from which a certain social objectivity pertains. The relation between capital’s organic composition and the development of the general law of capitalist accumulation14 is a moment in Capital which forms perhaps its most prophetic content, whether of Marx’s intention or not, and from which the practices of the development and reproduction of capitalism historically can be understood in terms of class struggle. This aim of the present interpretation thus hopes to take its movement through Marx to many works outside of the text of Capital, and further examine this opening of history-in-process as a becoming in order to further develop the political stakes of historiographic praxis.
Next week we will continue with an analysis and interpretation of the determinants of the organic composition of capital, and the objective dialectic of the historical and transhistorical as it pertains to capitalist production as the unity of the labor process and the valorization process.
Many thanks to Nathan Eisenberg for this helpful formulation.
Marx, Capital Volume I (1976) pp. 167-8
Ibid, p. 165
Ibid, p. 169
Ibid, pp. 173-4
Ibid, p. 174
György Lukács, History & Class Consciousness (1967) p. 202, from “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”
Ibid, pp. 202-3
Ibid, p. 203
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid, pp. 203-4
István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (1995) p. 483
Marx (1976) p. 798 “The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws, it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here”